How is this any different from the "telautograph" machines common in the 1950s? As a kid I was fascinated by one I saw in a New York hotel that was used to allow a manager in one location to remotely sign documents in another. Heaven only knows that technology it used, but my vague memory is that it looked like an X-Y version of an analog, galvanometer-type pen recorder.
Click, click, Google: Wikipedia has an article on the Telautograph which mentions that "The telautograph was first publicly exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago."
...when I see the local Chevy dealer advertising a HyWire for sale.
The HyWire? What, you don't remember the HyWire? It's the car they were showing all over in 2001. It's the reason they weren't developing a hybrid car... because hybrids were lame. They were going to leave them to stodgy old companies like Toyota, while they leapfrogged Toyota with hydrogen fuel-cell cars, which were the future of the company. In 2002 GM's head of R&D said "We are driving to have compelling and affordable fuel cell vehicles on the road by the end of the decade."
Then, of course, it was the Chevy Volt, which Bob Lutz said was the most important car GM had ever produced, yet decided was not important enough to stick around to see through completion.
I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever see a Volt--the shipping date keeps slipping and the estimated list price keeps going up, from $48,000 last I heard. The price of two Honda Insights. But nobody will notice because by then GM will have the auto journalism world agog with some other exciting new concept car which will be ready in just a few years.
Nope, many of you probably don't. Around the time the Russians put up Sputnik, the American space program was centered around Project Vanguard. It was going to put our first satellite into orbit. And our first satellite was going to be way better than Sputnik.
Only the rockets kept crashing. It became a source of national embarrassment and the subject of jokes.
I was stunned to read, in the article, that "No cough remedies have ever been proven better than a placebo."
As I write this, I'm recovering from a stress fracture of a rib caused by a persistent cough.
Let me describe the sequence of events. I coughed nonstop for two weeks. I experienced rapidly-worsening pain in one rib. My doctor prescribed codeine-based cough medicine. I took it. Cough stopped; I slept through the night without coughing for the first time. My rib is getting better.
When you touch the screen and it's not clear what you want, an animated character can pop up and say "Hi! It looks like you're trying to rotate the screen image!" and coach you on how to bend your fingers into the right position to meet the software's expectations.
To prevent errors, when you're done, a dialog box can pop up saying "Do you really want to rotate the screen image? Allow/deny." Then there will be no errors... or any errors that do occur can be blamed on the user.
And, of course, there can be a Screen Rotation Wizard to give you a simple six-screen walkthrough, and context-sensitive Help available simply by tapping your ring finger in the northeast quadrant of the screen while you're making your gesture.
The Microsoft Way is that the computer should control the user, not the other way around. Once the touchscreen programmers absorb this fundamental principal, all their problems can be easily solved.
What with the problems with the urine recycling system, naming the new lab after an incontinence pad could, if it ever leaked to the press, dampen public enthusiasm and, uh, tick people off.
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status?"
The body monitors its own status continously and constantly takes corrective actions. The process is called homeostasis, a word invented by Walter B. Cannon in the 1930s although the concept is much older.
You might as well say:
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely nothing monitoring our posture to keep us from falling over?"
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to walk around with absolutely no electrodes on our chests to keep our hearts beating?"
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to walk around with absolutely no portable diathermy machine to hold our body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit?"
This is not to say that canes and electronic pacemakers... and, for all I know, portable diathermy machines... might not be helpful to some people, but the body has a great capacity to take care of itself without medical intervention.
That's funny, in 1992, when the people at Microsoft made the big presentation on Windows NT to the Fortune 500 company I worked at, they swore up and down that portability was a major goal, and that it was going to be a multiplatform product that would run on every important processor family, including MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC and, of course, the ACE initiative machines (remember the ACE initiative? I thought not.)
Within that company, Windows advocates used this as a major talking point against UNIX advocates.
You're telling me it Windows only runs on Intel?:)
During the 1960s, it was fairly common to see the occasional pin-up picture emerging from the high-speed chain printers in university computing centers.
Programs that printed the correct carriage control character in the first column... was it a plus sign?.... could overprint multiple lines and get a reasonable grey scale, but of course the page was still only 132 pixels wide, and there was quite a lot of whitespace separating adjacent pixels.
"Command substitution was something else I added because that gives you very general mechanism to do string processing; it allows you to get strings back from commands and use them as the text of the script as if you had typed it directly. I think this was a new idea that I, at least, had not seen in scripting languages, except perhaps LISP,' he says."
Surely this feature was present in Calvin Mooer's TRAC, circa 1964 or thereabouts. I've forgotten the distinction between expanded macros by means of single or double slashes, but I believe one or the other of them substituted the macro expansion back in the stream for further processing. My recollection is that it was fundamental to the way TRAC was used in practice. My recollection is also that TRAC was moderately well-known in the community at the time, so the idea was "in the air."
I believe it also existed in a host of "macro" capabilities in assembly languages... familiar to me in MIDAS, an assembly language for the PDP-1 circa 1965 or so. MIDAS survived into the PDP-6 and PDP-10, may have been developed earlier for the TX-0, and I think may have been patterned on advanced macro assemblers for the IBM 709.
I just don't get it. What exactly is so difficult about the concept of a file format containing data only, that is passively rendered by an application?
In fact, wasn't passive rendering the whole reason from moving from PostScript to PDF?
Is it that hard to review code and make sure that the interpretation of the format doesn't trigger any conditional branches that cause execution of anything but fixed, static, read-only code within the application? It seems to me you could use a modified version of one of the development tools used for embedded firmware development to guarantee that that's the case.
Why are software writers so enamored of "extensible" schemes that depend on data being executed?
I can see how executing data might have seemed like a cool concept in 1997, but this is 2009 and I don't want or need books in which monsters are capable of leaping out of the illustrations and grabbing me by the throat.
This sounds like a recreational device, and perhaps an interesting one. Calling it a "James Bond-style jet pack" is rather misleading, though.
Safety: a fall into water from that height is not safe but not suicidal. I wonder how bad it is to be underneath and accidentally get sprayed by one of those jets? The video clip is silent; I'll bet the thing makes a hell of a racket. I wonder how many waterfronts will put up with it.
I'm thinking, team sports. An extreme kind of polo or soccer or something. With players deliberately maneuvering to hit each other with the jets and/or tangle their hoses.
Stabilized images on the retina fade. Microsaccades prevent it from happening. I actually think I read an article about this in Scientific American in the 1960s. Certainly I encountered it in a perceptual psychology course I took in the 1970s.
As for illusions like the Enigma illusion, we were told that caused by small eye movements, amplified by a moire effect between the image and the afterimage. Maybe that was only the professor's guess, and the new study did something to pin it down, but it's not a very new idea.
No special motivation is needed. If employees believe they are being listened to, they'll suggest ideas. Everybody has ideas about how to do things better, and everybody loves to talk about them.
I have no idea what the committees and prizes are about, but you may be sure your employees are getting a mixed message. If they are not producing ideas, it is because there is some other dynamic going on that is inhibiting them. You need to find out what that is and remove it, not fiddle around trying to oppose it with raffles and "recognition."
By the way, there's nothing so demotivating as seeing the people who won the plaques and the gift certificates get laid off.
For example, perhaps your company has a culture in which employees are told what to do instead of what goals are to be achieved, and punished if they achieve the desired goals in a manner different than prescribed. Employees quickly learn that procedure is everything, and that nobody wants to know a better but different way from getting from point A to point B.
This never would have happened back in the good old days of the Princeton IAS machine. People took good care of their computers then. And kept track of them. You never would have caught a scientist taking one home.
And children respected their parents, and a dollar was a dollar, and we had wonderful music--not this modern stuff, it's noise, I tell you, just noise.
When I opened my G1G1 XO last year, I was very excited. Practically the first thing I did was press the "View Source" button. Nothing happened.
A few months ago I did the big upgrade and tried again. Still nothing.
I don't know what people are talking about. I can view the HTML source of a Web page, but view the source code for the OS itself or any of the major applications? Nope.
The state is involved in this because the airwaves belong to the public, not to the television stations. You cannot own a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum any more than you can own the musical note "middle C." Spectrum is licensed, not sold.
The switch to digital benefits the commercial interests that get to use the freed-up spectrum, and it hurts the existing viewers that are watching analog broadcast signals over an antenna. So part of the deal was that the people who benefit would pay to make up for the cost and inconvenience to the people hurt by it.
That sounds perfectly fair to me.
The FCC is involved because they administer the use of the public airwaves.
The delay is justified, for two reasons. First, the coupon program was bungled, and running out of coupons shows that consumers are NOT clueless, MORE have responded than expected, because they are doing their best to prepare.
Second, as nearly as I can tell, nothing is being done to prepare consumers for the channel reassignments that will occur along with the analog shutdown. A significant number of stations will be changing their assigned frequency for digital transmission, and quite a lot of them will be changing from UHF to VHF.
At the very least you'll need to do a channel rescan. If I were a station like WHDH, the big Channel 7 NBC affiliate in Boston, I'd long since have posted directions on my website telling people about this and, if possible, telling them how to do a manual channel rescan. But they haven't.
Now, if you have a honkin' big old UHF/VHF rooftop antenna left over from the eighties, and you buy a converter box, you'll be fine. But if you bought one of those nice, compact, inexpensive "HDTV antenna" they've been selling for several years now, that, my friends, is a UHF antenna and you'll lose any digital stations that move to VHF. Maybe not, if they're powerful enough. But I don't know how on earth you can find out before the actual moment arrives.
And if you don't have a big honkin' VHF antenna on your roof already, February 17th is not a great time to be up there installing one.
So, check antennaweb.org for those channel reassignments, because I suspect some of the smug digerati are not quite as prepared for the transition as they think they are.
Prior to the Three Mile Island accident, the Rasmussen report (WASH-1400) calculated that chances of an accident severe enough to cause core damage had been calculated as one in 20,000 per reactor per year.
The accident happened three months after the reactor was first put into commercial operation.
I don't suppose there's any way of knowing for sure that the Three Mile Island really wasn't a one-chance-in-20,000 (or one in 80,000, given that it only operated for 1/4 of a year), but it does not give me confidence in the ability of experts to calculate the probability of very-low-probability, very-high-consequence events.
More to the point... it's quite disconcerting to read that it's now believed that the black holes can last far longer than was previously thought. It suggests that they don't have a very good handle on the physics yet.
It's sort of like saying "The Titanic is safe, because it will be traveling in waters without icebergs. Oops, we've just discovered it will be traveling in waters with icebergs, but it doesn't matter, because it won't sink even if it hits one."
2) It probably was bad code. I know you and I and none of the people reading ever write bad code, but, Sturgeon's Law, most of the code written in this world is bad.
3) And I've known people who were personally whipsawed by lobbying their managers for extra time to follow Microsoft "best practices" only to have Microsoft do a 180 on best practices. The specific case I'm thinking about in particular had something to do with.INI files. I'm not a Windows programmer and I may be wrong on the exact technical details, but I think they spent time moving everything out of.INI files and into the Registry, according to Microsoft guidelines, only to be told by Microsoft a few years later... without any acknowledgment that this was a change... that the Registry "wasn't a database" and wasn't suitable for this purpose, and program settings should never be stored in the Registry, but rather in the.INI files which, Microsoft said, were designed for that purpose.
I'm think they had some issues with different formats, string-length capabilities, and so forth between.INI files in different versions of Windows, too, inexplicable as you'd think the code for reading and writing.INI files could have been written in portable C and work identically across OS versions.
Typical Microsoft. Anyone remember Windows 3.0 real mode, protected mode, and virtual mode? At least there was some excuse for that. But it had the beneficial effect (for Microsoft) of soaking up most of organizations' development efforts just trying to target, optimize, and SQA products for three different kinds of Windows, leaving precious little bandwidth for work on, oh, UNIX or OS/2 or Mac OS.
I once worked for a Fortune 500 company where people literally used the word "port" to describe what needed to be done to keep a piece of software working under Windows, as in "We're porting the code from Windows 3.1 to Windows for Workgroups."
IBM did the same thing when they were dominant. Multiple versions of everything and small changes mostly for changes' sake. Big organizations couldn't afford to ignore IBM, and were kept very busy tracking all that stuff.
People build careers on the personal knowledge of the various changes IBM kept making, and people build careers now on their personal knowledge of the changes and variations in Microsoft products.
Lousy engineering. Great way to exploit a monopolistic position in the marketplace.
Just because "there were plenty of people suggesting Microsoft should just exit the Zune hardware business entirely," just because the Zune has nothing in particular to offer and is doing poorly, does not mean that they will exit the Zune business.
One of the things I really admire about Microsoft is their tenacity and stick-to-it-iveness. If they think something is important, they'll stick with it and improve it with each release.
I worked at a former Fortune 500 company that just didn't have this tenacity. They had no real strategy, no sense of what was important and what wasn't beyond short-term industry buzz. Their basic strategy seemed to be "do whatever IBM was doing a year ago." And, whereever they drilled, if they didn't strike oil ten feet down they'd give up.
It was very frustrating to those of us who saw serious but fixable flaws in their hastily-released products and could never convince them to settle on what was important and hang in there.
Whether this will be the case with Zune is open to doubt. I have little respect for the Zune, I don't think Microsoft has any idea what they're doing, and I think it will go down as an ignominious failure like Microsoft Bob. But if they think it's important, I believe they'll stick with it and try to improve it, and when they do they have an impressive track record of getting something good enough to be counted a success.
They could uncripple the Zune, give it the ability to record FM broadcasts, provide unlimited wireless filesharing, and they'd have an overnight success... if they had the guts.
Is this some legalism, as in nutrition labeling, in which rounding is allowed? Can they round the power consumption to the nearest watt, and call anything drawing less than 0.5 watts "zero watts?"
I realize that geek.com does say "absolutely no power," but the farthest I can trace that statement is to pcworld, not to Siemens.
It's not clear why we should believe the story. It has all the earmarks of embellishment. The detail that tears it for me is the assertion that the bad guy said "I will be ruthless and make you look really, really good Kelly.â
Nobody describes themselves as "ruthless." Nor would they be so unsubtle as to say "I will make you look really, really good." Nor would many people be so naÃve as to trust someone to make them look really, really good after they had just described themself as "ruthless."
This colorful detail sounds as if it were made up. So why should we believe the rest of the story?
I don't think this is a piece of journalism, with real names concealed. I think this is just someone asserting that nice guys finish last... in the form of a parable.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this any different from the "telautograph" machines common in the 1950s? As a kid I was fascinated by one I saw in a New York hotel that was used to allow a manager in one location to remotely sign documents in another. Heaven only knows that technology it used, but my vague memory is that it looked like an X-Y version of an analog, galvanometer-type pen recorder.
Click, click, Google: Wikipedia has an article on the Telautograph which mentions that "The telautograph was first publicly exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago."
I don't get it.
Why is this stuff connected to the Internet?
Who decided to connect it to the Internet?
When did they start connecting it to the Internet? They always used to tell us not to worry, because it wasn't.
Can't these guys afford a few leased lines?
...when I see the local Chevy dealer advertising a HyWire for sale.
The HyWire? What, you don't remember the HyWire? It's the car they were showing all over in 2001. It's the reason they weren't developing a hybrid car... because hybrids were lame. They were going to leave them to stodgy old companies like Toyota, while they leapfrogged Toyota with hydrogen fuel-cell cars, which were the future of the company. In 2002 GM's head of R&D said "We are driving to have compelling and affordable fuel cell vehicles on the road by the end of the decade."
Then, of course, it was the Chevy Volt, which Bob Lutz said was the most important car GM had ever produced, yet decided was not important enough to stick around to see through completion.
I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever see a Volt--the shipping date keeps slipping and the estimated list price keeps going up, from $48,000 last I heard. The price of two Honda Insights. But nobody will notice because by then GM will have the auto journalism world agog with some other exciting new concept car which will be ready in just a few years.
Nope, many of you probably don't. Around the time the Russians put up Sputnik, the American space program was centered around Project Vanguard. It was going to put our first satellite into orbit. And our first satellite was going to be way better than Sputnik.
Only the rockets kept crashing. It became a source of national embarrassment and the subject of jokes.
See this image, for examp.e.
I was stunned to read, in the article, that "No cough remedies have ever been proven better than a placebo."
As I write this, I'm recovering from a stress fracture of a rib caused by a persistent cough.
Let me describe the sequence of events. I coughed nonstop for two weeks. I experienced rapidly-worsening pain in one rib. My doctor prescribed codeine-based cough medicine. I took it. Cough stopped; I slept through the night without coughing for the first time. My rib is getting better.
Placebo effect? I don't believe it.
So I followed the link to TFA... the second FA... the one that TFA cites. The title of that article is Should we advise parents to administer over the counter cough medicines for acute cough? Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
It's the over-the-counter cough medicines that haven't been proved to work.
Which I can quite believe. Because I was taking them before the doctor wrote me the prescription.
But Microsoft can fix this easily.
When you touch the screen and it's not clear what you want, an animated character can pop up and say "Hi! It looks like you're trying to rotate the screen image!" and coach you on how to bend your fingers into the right position to meet the software's expectations.
To prevent errors, when you're done, a dialog box can pop up saying "Do you really want to rotate the screen image? Allow/deny." Then there will be no errors... or any errors that do occur can be blamed on the user.
And, of course, there can be a Screen Rotation Wizard to give you a simple six-screen walkthrough, and context-sensitive Help available simply by tapping your ring finger in the northeast quadrant of the screen while you're making your gesture.
The Microsoft Way is that the computer should control the user, not the other way around. Once the touchscreen programmers absorb this fundamental principal, all their problems can be easily solved.
Actually, NASA lucked out.
What with the problems with the urine recycling system, naming the new lab after an incontinence pad could, if it ever leaked to the press, dampen public enthusiasm and, uh, tick people off.
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status?"
The body monitors its own status continously and constantly takes corrective actions. The process is called homeostasis, a word invented by Walter B. Cannon in the 1930s although the concept is much older.
You might as well say:
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely nothing monitoring our posture to keep us from falling over?"
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to walk around with absolutely no electrodes on our chests to keep our hearts beating?"
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and dangerous it is to walk around with absolutely no portable diathermy machine to hold our body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit?"
This is not to say that canes and electronic pacemakers... and, for all I know, portable diathermy machines... might not be helpful to some people, but the body has a great capacity to take care of itself without medical intervention.
That's funny, in 1992, when the people at Microsoft made the big presentation on Windows NT to the Fortune 500 company I worked at, they swore up and down that portability was a major goal, and that it was going to be a multiplatform product that would run on every important processor family, including MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC and, of course, the ACE initiative machines (remember the ACE initiative? I thought not.)
Within that company, Windows advocates used this as a major talking point against UNIX advocates.
You're telling me it Windows only runs on Intel? :)
During the 1960s, it was fairly common to see the occasional pin-up picture emerging from the high-speed chain printers in university computing centers.
Programs that printed the correct carriage control character in the first column... was it a plus sign?.... could overprint multiple lines and get a reasonable grey scale, but of course the page was still only 132 pixels wide, and there was quite a lot of whitespace separating adjacent pixels.
"Command substitution was something else I added because that gives you very general mechanism to do string processing; it allows you to get strings back from commands and use them as the text of the script as if you had typed it directly. I think this was a new idea that I, at least, had not seen in scripting languages, except perhaps LISP,' he says."
Surely this feature was present in Calvin Mooer's TRAC, circa 1964 or thereabouts. I've forgotten the distinction between expanded macros by means of single or double slashes, but I believe one or the other of them substituted the macro expansion back in the stream for further processing. My recollection is that it was fundamental to the way TRAC was used in practice. My recollection is also that TRAC was moderately well-known in the community at the time, so the idea was "in the air."
I believe it also existed in a host of "macro" capabilities in assembly languages... familiar to me in MIDAS, an assembly language for the PDP-1 circa 1965 or so. MIDAS survived into the PDP-6 and PDP-10, may have been developed earlier for the TX-0, and I think may have been patterned on advanced macro assemblers for the IBM 709.
I just don't get it. What exactly is so difficult about the concept of a file format containing data only, that is passively rendered by an application?
In fact, wasn't passive rendering the whole reason from moving from PostScript to PDF?
Is it that hard to review code and make sure that the interpretation of the format doesn't trigger any conditional branches that cause execution of anything but fixed, static, read-only code within the application? It seems to me you could use a modified version of one of the development tools used for embedded firmware development to guarantee that that's the case.
Why are software writers so enamored of "extensible" schemes that depend on data being executed?
I can see how executing data might have seemed like a cool concept in 1997, but this is 2009 and I don't want or need books in which monsters are capable of leaping out of the illustrations and grabbing me by the throat.
This sounds like a recreational device, and perhaps an interesting one. Calling it a "James Bond-style jet pack" is rather misleading, though.
Safety: a fall into water from that height is not safe but not suicidal. I wonder how bad it is to be underneath and accidentally get sprayed by one of those jets? The video clip is silent; I'll bet the thing makes a hell of a racket. I wonder how many waterfronts will put up with it.
I'm thinking, team sports. An extreme kind of polo or soccer or something. With players deliberately maneuvering to hit each other with the jets and/or tangle their hoses.
Stabilized images on the retina fade. Microsaccades prevent it from happening. I actually think I read an article about this in Scientific American in the 1960s. Certainly I encountered it in a perceptual psychology course I took in the 1970s.
As for illusions like the Enigma illusion, we were told that caused by small eye movements, amplified by a moire effect between the image and the afterimage. Maybe that was only the professor's guess, and the new study did something to pin it down, but it's not a very new idea.
No special motivation is needed. If employees believe they are being listened to, they'll suggest ideas. Everybody has ideas about how to do things better, and everybody loves to talk about them.
I have no idea what the committees and prizes are about, but you may be sure your employees are getting a mixed message. If they are not producing ideas, it is because there is some other dynamic going on that is inhibiting them. You need to find out what that is and remove it, not fiddle around trying to oppose it with raffles and "recognition."
By the way, there's nothing so demotivating as seeing the people who won the plaques and the gift certificates get laid off.
For example, perhaps your company has a culture in which employees are told what to do instead of what goals are to be achieved, and punished if they achieve the desired goals in a manner different than prescribed. Employees quickly learn that procedure is everything, and that nobody wants to know a better but different way from getting from point A to point B.
This never would have happened back in the good old days of the Princeton IAS machine. People took good care of their computers then. And kept track of them. You never would have caught a scientist taking one home.
And children respected their parents, and a dollar was a dollar, and we had wonderful music--not this modern stuff, it's noise, I tell you, just noise.
When I opened my G1G1 XO last year, I was very excited. Practically the first thing I did was press the "View Source" button. Nothing happened.
A few months ago I did the big upgrade and tried again. Still nothing.
I don't know what people are talking about. I can view the HTML source of a Web page, but view the source code for the OS itself or any of the major applications? Nope.
It's one of the big unkept promises.
The state is involved in this because the airwaves belong to the public, not to the television stations. You cannot own a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum any more than you can own the musical note "middle C." Spectrum is licensed, not sold.
The switch to digital benefits the commercial interests that get to use the freed-up spectrum, and it hurts the existing viewers that are watching analog broadcast signals over an antenna. So part of the deal was that the people who benefit would pay to make up for the cost and inconvenience to the people hurt by it.
That sounds perfectly fair to me.
The FCC is involved because they administer the use of the public airwaves.
The delay is justified, for two reasons. First, the coupon program was bungled, and running out of coupons shows that consumers are NOT clueless, MORE have responded than expected, because they are doing their best to prepare.
Second, as nearly as I can tell, nothing is being done to prepare consumers for the channel reassignments that will occur along with the analog shutdown. A significant number of stations will be changing their assigned frequency for digital transmission, and quite a lot of them will be changing from UHF to VHF.
At the very least you'll need to do a channel rescan. If I were a station like WHDH, the big Channel 7 NBC affiliate in Boston, I'd long since have posted directions on my website telling people about this and, if possible, telling them how to do a manual channel rescan. But they haven't.
Now, if you have a honkin' big old UHF/VHF rooftop antenna left over from the eighties, and you buy a converter box, you'll be fine. But if you bought one of those nice, compact, inexpensive "HDTV antenna" they've been selling for several years now, that, my friends, is a UHF antenna and you'll lose any digital stations that move to VHF. Maybe not, if they're powerful enough. But I don't know how on earth you can find out before the actual moment arrives.
And if you don't have a big honkin' VHF antenna on your roof already, February 17th is not a great time to be up there installing one.
So, check antennaweb.org for those channel reassignments, because I suspect some of the smug digerati are not quite as prepared for the transition as they think they are.
Prior to the Three Mile Island accident, the Rasmussen report (WASH-1400) calculated that chances of an accident severe enough to cause core damage had been calculated as one in 20,000 per reactor per year.
The accident happened three months after the reactor was first put into commercial operation.
I don't suppose there's any way of knowing for sure that the Three Mile Island really wasn't a one-chance-in-20,000 (or one in 80,000, given that it only operated for 1/4 of a year), but it does not give me confidence in the ability of experts to calculate the probability of very-low-probability, very-high-consequence events.
More to the point... it's quite disconcerting to read that it's now believed that the black holes can last far longer than was previously thought. It suggests that they don't have a very good handle on the physics yet.
It's sort of like saying "The Titanic is safe, because it will be traveling in waters without icebergs. Oops, we've just discovered it will be traveling in waters with icebergs, but it doesn't matter, because it won't sink even if it hits one."
1) It wasn't my group.
2) It probably was bad code. I know you and I and none of the people reading ever write bad code, but, Sturgeon's Law, most of the code written in this world is bad.
3) And I've known people who were personally whipsawed by lobbying their managers for extra time to follow Microsoft "best practices" only to have Microsoft do a 180 on best practices. The specific case I'm thinking about in particular had something to do with .INI files. I'm not a Windows programmer and I may be wrong on the exact technical details, but I think they spent time moving everything out of .INI files and into the Registry, according to Microsoft guidelines, only to be told by Microsoft a few years later... without any acknowledgment that this was a change... that the Registry "wasn't a database" and wasn't suitable for this purpose, and program settings should never be stored in the Registry, but rather in the .INI files which, Microsoft said, were designed for that purpose.
I'm think they had some issues with different formats, string-length capabilities, and so forth between .INI files in different versions of Windows, too, inexplicable as you'd think the code for reading and writing .INI files could have been written in portable C and work identically across OS versions.
Typical Microsoft. Anyone remember Windows 3.0 real mode, protected mode, and virtual mode? At least there was some excuse for that. But it had the beneficial effect (for Microsoft) of soaking up most of organizations' development efforts just trying to target, optimize, and SQA products for three different kinds of Windows, leaving precious little bandwidth for work on, oh, UNIX or OS/2 or Mac OS.
I once worked for a Fortune 500 company where people literally used the word "port" to describe what needed to be done to keep a piece of software working under Windows, as in "We're porting the code from Windows 3.1 to Windows for Workgroups."
IBM did the same thing when they were dominant. Multiple versions of everything and small changes mostly for changes' sake. Big organizations couldn't afford to ignore IBM, and were kept very busy tracking all that stuff.
People build careers on the personal knowledge of the various changes IBM kept making, and people build careers now on their personal knowledge of the changes and variations in Microsoft products.
Lousy engineering. Great way to exploit a monopolistic position in the marketplace.
Just because "there were plenty of people suggesting Microsoft should just exit the Zune hardware business entirely," just because the Zune has nothing in particular to offer and is doing poorly, does not mean that they will exit the Zune business.
One of the things I really admire about Microsoft is their tenacity and stick-to-it-iveness. If they think something is important, they'll stick with it and improve it with each release.
I worked at a former Fortune 500 company that just didn't have this tenacity. They had no real strategy, no sense of what was important and what wasn't beyond short-term industry buzz. Their basic strategy seemed to be "do whatever IBM was doing a year ago." And, whereever they drilled, if they didn't strike oil ten feet down they'd give up.
It was very frustrating to those of us who saw serious but fixable flaws in their hastily-released products and could never convince them to settle on what was important and hang in there.
Whether this will be the case with Zune is open to doubt. I have little respect for the Zune, I don't think Microsoft has any idea what they're doing, and I think it will go down as an ignominious failure like Microsoft Bob. But if they think it's important, I believe they'll stick with it and try to improve it, and when they do they have an impressive track record of getting something good enough to be counted a success.
They could uncripple the Zune, give it the ability to record FM broadcasts, provide unlimited wireless filesharing, and they'd have an overnight success... if they had the guts.
Is this some legalism, as in nutrition labeling, in which rounding is allowed? Can they round the power consumption to the nearest watt, and call anything drawing less than 0.5 watts "zero watts?"
I realize that geek.com does say "absolutely no power," but the farthest I can trace that statement is to pcworld, not to Siemens.
It's not clear why we should believe the story. It has all the earmarks of embellishment. The detail that tears it for me is the assertion that the bad guy said "I will be ruthless and make you look really, really good Kelly.â
Nobody describes themselves as "ruthless." Nor would they be so unsubtle as to say "I will make you look really, really good." Nor would many people be so naÃve as to trust someone to make them look really, really good after they had just described themself as "ruthless."
This colorful detail sounds as if it were made up. So why should we believe the rest of the story?
I don't think this is a piece of journalism, with real names concealed. I think this is just someone asserting that nice guys finish last... in the form of a parable.